Saturday 9 April 2005 07.23 EDT
First published on Saturday 9 April 2005 07.23 EDT

Those Feet: A Sensual History of English Footballby David Winner288pp, Bloomsbury, £14.99

Authors of non-fiction often use their introductions to explain to their reader the genesis of the book that follows. This is a not unhelpful practice. A book that starts with a bet in a pub is unlikely to contain many footnotes.

The idea for David Winner's follow-up to his well-received Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football came to him during a discussion with a French friend after he had watched England perform poorly in a friendly football match. This is telling because those who watch friendly football matches, let alone seek meaning from them, are extremely dedicated, not to say obsessed. And this is both the book's strength and weakness. The chapters involving detailed research are informative, enjoyable and well-written; those in which he attempts to interpret larger themes - for instance "declinism" - through football are baffling.

Winner's opening essay makes the persuasive case that football was invented as an alternative to masturbation. He introduces us to the brothers Thring. The elder was headmaster of Uppingham and given to delivering sermons entitled "Death, and Death, and Death". The younger was the first person to attempt to codify what he called "The Simplest Game" in just 10 rules.

Moving swiftly on from boys' hobbies to Boys' Own heroes, Winner traces how many of the latter have names similar to the current Manchester United captain Roy Keane. The hero of the 1859 novel Sword and Gown is Royston Keene, who is "the best swordsman in the Light Brigade". A story in the Super Thriller Annual of 1957 ends with, "By Jove, Mr Keen, England has something to thank you for today!"

The authors are no less stirring than their prose: Ernest W Alias was "born with only one lung ... a marvellous raconteur, he told all his yarns without a facial movement. He could literally smell a fog coming ... his tact in any emergency was unsurpassed."

The Roy Keane conceit, though nice, is flawed. Having been born and brought up in Cork it is unlikely Roy Keane will be thrilled to find himself playing a significant part in a history of English football, sensual or otherwise. Winner tacitly admits this by including no mention of the defining moment of Roy's career, the argument with Irish manager Mick McCarthy, which led Keane to walk out of his national team. This has to be ignored because it doesn't conform to his thesis that by their football shall you know the English, or even an Irishman who is "the timeless archetype of the English game".

It is a theory that becomes ever more ragged when, attempting to connect Graham Taylor's misjudgments with the Tory party's misrule, Winner writes: "in 1993 it wasn't just football that was making the English miserable. The effects of the ERM crisis the previous September were still felt."

It collapses entirely as Winner dedicates a chapter to attempting to demonstrate that "Italy seemed to be overtaking Britain on and off the pitch". The evidence given for Italian economic superiority includes an article written in 2001 by Theodore Dalrymple that concludes: "Bari is incomparably richer and less dilapidated than Dover."

Things get worse. In an essay on football boots and sexuality, Winner quotes, admiringly, Cameron Kippen, "historian of footwear and eroticism and lecturer at Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Australia". Which I assumed was a joke, except Winner has no feeling for comedy, a failing evidenced by: "In 1997 Zola (Gianfranco, not Emile) was voted Footballer of the Year."

By now Winner's jaunty tone, which served him well in the opening chapters, is suffocated by the inclusion of far-flung academics taking things too seriously and tipping over into nonsense. A professor of English and American literature at the University of Tor Vergata backs up her theory of information by asserting that no one in England knows where Heathrow is.

The whole mish-mash begins to resemble one of those English football friendlies in which all 11 substitutes are given a turn. This is a shame because if the field had been left to Winner the book might have been more entertaining and enlightening.